“My opinion is that Linux is ready, and has been ready for some time, for the average person’s desktop computer,” Stone explained. “The only thing that stands in the way is availability of some software and its image as a geek toy. If the software was there and it came installed like Windows currently does, Windows would be a thing of the past.

Linux is an amazing operating system, and it has much to offer any desktop user. But it’s also not perfect and it has its share of problems and issues. If you were the King (or Queen) of open source, what would you do to improve Linux? Foss Force asked its readers a similar question recently and shared some of their responses.

Desktop

When creating an ‘application’ from a web page Chrome attempts to create an icon for it using the favicon — the small icon you see in the corner of a tab next to the page title, or if the site specifies one, the ‘apple touch icon’.

Server

One of the earliest commercial ventures to emerge in the Software Defined Networking (SDN) space was Big Switch Networks, founded in 2010 by SDN pioneer Guido Appenzeller and Kyle Forster. In late 2013, Douglas Murray joined the company as its new CEO and has been helping to set direction and accelerate commercial adoption ever since.

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Part of the direction involves an effort known as Open Network Linux, which is a component of Switch Light and has now been donated to the Open Compute Platform (OCP) and its open networking effort.

“Open Network Linux takes a piece of what’s inside Switch Light, anything that you would normally need to leverage to bring up a switch,” Murray said.

IBM positioned the move as a “sharp contrast [with] other chip and server manufacturers’ proprietary business models,” but with its hardware sales tumbling 23 percent in Q1 and its Power business falling 31 percent last year, the vendor badly needs a hearty seedling from which to build a stronger beanstalk.

Kernel Space

Daniel Vetter of Intel’s Open-Source Technology Center sent in the first batch of drm-intel-next changes for landing into drm-next, David Airlie’s DRM tree as the subsystem maintainer for the work that will land in Linux 3.16. The changes already queued up for this next kernel cycle contain a lot of work on an Intel Gen7 command parser, continued Valley View / Bay Trail fixes, continued work on Intel Broadwell support, run-time power management support for Broadwell and Sandy Bridge, initial Cherryview support, and other code changes.

Another week, another rc. So far, no big scares, and rc3 is appropriately smaller than rc2 was, so we’re following the right trajectory here.

The statistics look fairly normal too, with half drivers (input, usb, gpu, acpi, regulator..) and a third arch updates (much of it again arm dts files, but other arm and some um updates too). The rest is misc, but mainly concentrated in filesystem updates (btrfs and ext4).

When a band releases their latest album in a Linux kernel module format, there should be little doubt that they’re probably a little geeky. But with netcat, the hints only begin there. Take for example their name: netcat is a popular Unix-based networking command-line tool. And then there’s the album name, Cycles Per Instruction. Oh – and their site is in plain text.

Stratos Karafotis posted a patch for the Intel P-State code today that changes the calculation method for the next pstate. Stratos wrote on the mailing list, “Currently the driver calculates the next pstate proportional to core_busy factor and reverse proportional to current pstate. Change the above method and calculate the next pstate independently of current pstate.”

The generic xf86-video-modesetting DDX driver that’s designed to work universally across Linux KMS drivers now has support for sever-managed file-descriptors, which will help this driver work on non-root X Servers.

With Ubuntu 14.04 LTS there is improved support for multi-GPU laptops (commonly what’s branded as NVIDIA Optimus configurations) where there is a discrete NVIDIA GPU used for high performance workloads to complement the low-power Intel integrated graphics. Ubuntu 14.04 LTS features better support for these Optimus / DRI PRIME configurations on both the open and closed-source graphics drivers. Here’s the Ubuntu 14.04 multi-GPU experience along with some OpenGL benchmarks and power consumption numbers between the different configurations.

Benchmarks

A common benchmark request at Phoronix lately has been to compare the Xen PV (para-virtualization) performance to Xen HVM (Hardware-assisted virtualization). Well, now that Ubuntu 14.04 LTS has been released, here’s some benchmarks from within Amazon’s EC2 compute cloud when comparing Ubuntu 14.04 Server PV and HVM instances.

Xen has long supported para-virtualization (PV) as its means of virtualization support for best performance and stability while minimizing overhead between Dom0 and the hypervisor by the two operating system software stacks working more closely together. The “newer” option for Xen virtualization users is to act as a hardware-assisted virtual machine (HVM) whereby the host and guest kernels don’t need to be patched, Windows can run as a HVM guest, and there’s complete hardware isolation.

Applications

One of the most used audio players on the Linux platform, Audacious, has just received a major update and a ton of features, most of them being requested by the community. Audacious may be a very popular audio player, but the developers are not upgrading it as often as they should. This means that when a new version is promoted, the release tends to be stuffed with new features and improvements.

CherryTree is a hierarchical note taking application that has many useful features such as syntax highlighting, password protection and image handling. This note taking app supports many languages; read the following list to find out the supported languages by CherryTree.

It’s been a long time since the last major release of the Inkscape open-source vector graphics editor software, but the 0.91 release (formerly known as Inkscape 0.49) is still brewing and will be a very exciting release with a ton of new functionality.

If you have an Nvidia graphics card on your system, then its recommended to install the official drivers released by Nvidia. The proprietory drivers would utilise the hardware properly delivering full performance.

Wine or Emulation

What’s new in this release (see below for details):
- More implementations for the Task Scheduler.
- C runtime made more compatible by sharing source files.
- Fixes in the Mac OS X joystick support.
- Various bug fixes.

If you remember from our previous post, Epic had disclosed plans to support Linux with their game engine, the Unreal Engine. That promise is now a reality with their latest iteration of the engine. The new version, Unreal Engine 4.1 now adds support, according to the release notes, Linux and SteamOS.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

This week we gathered around ten of the KDE Frameworks contributors for a sprint focusing on preparing the release. As usual I went the let’s have a board with sticky notes route. We dumped information from the wiki there and been working on tasks since then. By the look of that board this morning I would say we did a nice job.

Ah, it’s that time of the year again, that time when the summer is rising up, the temperatures are warming, you are getting your gear around and planning to go to the beach to do a swim and suddenly you discover that there is a dive software for linux and you wanna try it doing a scuba diving on your nearest beach resort.

I’m happy to announce that I’ve been accepted as student for this year’s Google Summer of Code! This summer, I’ll have the chance to improve the Clang integration in KDevelop, something we (the KDevelop developers) have been working on for some months already.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

Gnome developers are currently working on Gnome 3.13 development version, which soon will turn into a stable release. The Gnome 3.14 version will be released this September after alot of testing and hacking on the current development version.

There are many features being discussed at the moment for the release of Gnome 3.14 such as Colour Tinting in GNOME Shell,Zimbra integration in Gnome and the ability to browse DLNA media servers in GNOME Photos.

I have to admit that I’m a bit of an ebook junkie, I’m always reading something and when I’m done with one book then it’s on to the next. So I was very happy to see a report today that Marta Milakovic has proposed an open source ebook reading application for GNOME. Given the soaring popularity of ebooks, I think this is a fantastic idea. I’d like to see something similar in all Linux desktop environments.

Pinguy OS 14.04 Mini, an Ubuntu remaster that comes with a large number of tweaks by default, has been released today.

Pinguy OS Mini is a stripped down version of Pinguy OS which comes with all the tweaks and fixes available in the main Pinguy OS version, but without most of the applications installed in Pinguy OS. Like the main version, it uses GNOME Shell (3.10) as the default “shell”.

Screenshots

Red Hat Family

Over the years Linux users has been consistently growing due to un-parallel benefits like cost and critical load performance over its competitors like Microsoft Windows. Red Hat Software (RHT) is one such company that provides Linux operating system for desktop and web servers. Red Hat is a leading player in open-source Linux that crossed $1 billion in annual revenue, and it has a solid plan to keep growing its business in the years ahead. Red Hat partners with enterprise vendors like IBM, HP, Intel, Cisco, Dell, and SAP this also provides a deeper penetration in the global market.

The company recently declared quarterly results and was firing all cylinders, it set records for new bookings and billings with strong renewals. It reported a record number of 30 deals that crossed $1 million, with 7 deals that crossed $5 million and 2 were over $10 million. Revenue of $400.4 million was recorded, up by 15.1% year over year also beating the management’s guided range of $397.0 million to $400.0 million.

According to the mailing lists, Canonical has officially start the development of Ubuntu 14.10 Utopic Unicorn, scheduled for the 17th of October 2014.

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But if everything happens as announced at the previous UDS, Unity 8 (over X.org) will be implemented on Ubuntu 14.10, while Mir will be already usable by October 2014, despite the fact that it will get set by default on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, along with systemd, which will replace Canonical’s Upstart init system. A demo video of both Unity 8 (Mir) and Unity 7 (X11) running on Ubuntu 14.04 is available.

That’s because there’s no way to boot a full Windows system from a USB stick to troubleshoot your PC—well, not without an Enterprise version of Windows and Windows To Go—but anyone can make a free Ubuntu USB drive, CD, or DVD. A Ubuntu live drive can be used as a digital Swiss army knife to troubleshoot all sorts of problems with any PC, whether you need to recover files from a failing computer, diagnose hardware problems, perform a deep virus scan from outside Windows, or even reset a forgotten Windows password.

Hot on the heels of my previous annoucement of my systemd PPA for trusty, I’m now happy to announce that the latest systemd 204-10ubuntu1 just landed in Utopic, after sorting out enough of the current uninstallability in -proposed. The other fixes (bluez, resolvconf, lightdm, etc.) already landed a few days ago. Compared to the PPA these have a lot of other fixes and cleanups, due to the excellent hackfest that we held last weekend.

Just days after Ubuntu 14.10 opened for development, a systemd package has landed within the “Utopic Unicorn” package archive that allows the Ubuntu desktop to be booted via systemd rather than Upstart.

Flavours and Variants

Xubuntu 14.04 LTS has been released in the wake of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS so it’s time for a full review. Xubuntu 14.04 is a long term support release, so the focus is really on stability and finesse, not on adding tons of new features. Xubuntu uses the Xfce desktop environment instead of Unity, so it works very well as a lightweight alternative to regular Ubuntu. Xubuntu can be particularly useful if you have an older or otherwise underpowered computer.

Its been two months since we had our alpha release and since then Ubuntu 14.04 has released as “stable”. That means the core for our upcoming Bodhi 3.0.0 release is finally stable enough for me to stamp a “beta” label onto it. For those that do not really care what I have to say and just want a download link, this beta release comes in the following three flavors:

Without doubt, the Raspberry Pi has been a whopping success and introduced countless people to Linux. But the Model B hardware is looking a bit long in the tooth now, and faster alternatives with more RAM are starting to appear.

The Raspberry Pi packs a lot of hardware into a sub-£30, credit-card sized package. From its ability to drive Full HD displays without a sweat to its on-board networking and GPIO capabilities, it’s a miniature marvel – but even its most ardent fans would admit that its audio subsystem leaves a little to be desired.

The second update to Sailfish for the Nexus 4 was released in mid-April at version 1.0.5.16. This newest update fixes phone calls so audio now actually work, timers and alarms now work, HTMI5 video and audio work within the browser, and the update is based upon the latest Sailfish code. There is though still some known issues with securely powering off the device, phone call audio volume not changing with the volume buttons, and other bugs.

HP is joining Lenovo in the strange world of Android laptops. The company hasn’t yet officially announced the SlateBook 14, but it briefly appeared on HP’s website — complete with a video outlining the device’s key features and specs. Most importantly, the SlateBook has full access to Google Play, so any apps you’ve already purchased and downloaded on a smartphone or tablet should work here. HP says the SlateBook 14 boosts Android’s productivity thanks to its 14-inch 1080p display and full-size keyboard. The laptop also includes Beats technology, which should help it pump out loud, powerful, and likely bass-heavy audio. HP has built in 2GB of RAM and 16GB of internal storage. But since this is Android and not a Chromebook, you may be left without the generous Google Drive cloud storage offers that come alongside many of those devices

Lenovo’s Yoga series of mobile devices pushes the envelope ever-so-slightly (see here and here, for instance) in a world of cookie-cutter units, with its latest tablet serving as a great example of the approach.

Open source software is a popular choice for libraries and librarians, not simply because recent austerity measures in many developed countries have tightened available budgets. The ability to customise the software for a library’s particular needs, the potential for interoperation with other software, and the lack of license restrictions makes open source software attractive.

Modern libraries need robust, scalable and flexible software to make their collections and services attractive, especially as digital libraries are radically transforming how information is disseminated. There are very few barriers to any library adopting an open source library system.

Those challenges could become more important as the software spreads to other uses. Unlike applicators like Democracy OS or Liquid Feedback, Loomio isn’t really designed for large scale political decision making. But it’s already been used for at least one government initiative. Last year, the Wellington City Council used Loomio to gather ideas and feedback from the public for new alcohol policies. The ideas floated included closing bars at midnight — which was shot down — and limiting the hours of operation of 24 hour liquor stores.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

Providing yet more evidence of how committed it is to its Firefox OS mobile platform, Mozilla has named Andreas Gal, an engineer who spearheaded and helped launch Firefox OS, as its new CTO. Gal, of course, will take the CTO spot that was left by Mozilla’s Brendan Eich, who subsequently stepped down from a CEO spot due to controversy over his contributions to support California’s Proposition 8.

SaaS/Big Data

An OpenStack training workshop was held as part of the recent, 4th Open Source Festival at the State University of New York at Albany. The workshop brought together over 40 participants for three hours to learn some of the fundamentals of OpenStack.

CMS

The Dutch town of Vught is making available the source code for its website, a preconfigured version of Drupal, an open source content management system. The software is now being implemented by the municipality of Almelo, and, says Frank Schaap, ICT policy maker for the town of Vught, “there are three more that are seriously considering to do the same.”

Education

One of the distinctive elements of the open source software movement are open development projects. These are the projects where software is developed cooperatively (not collaboratively, necessarily) in public, often by people contributing from multiple organizations. All the processes that lead to the creation and release of software—design, development, testing, planning—happen using publicly visible tools. Projects also actively try to grow their contributor base.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

Public Services/Government

Of all the politicians newly elected in France’s municipal elections 143 have pledged their support for free software. The new councillors signed the Free Software Pact, a support campaign organised by April, an advocacy group. Signatories include the mayor of the city of Dijon, François Rebsamen, appointed Minister for Employment in France’s new government on 2 April.

Openness/Sharing

An OpenStack training workshop was held as part of the recent, 4th Open Source Festival at the State University of New York at Albany. The workshop brought together over 40 participants for three hours to learn some of the fundamentals of OpenStack.

Their open-source-software project—or community-source, as they refer to it—was a complex undertaking, requiring technical and financial collaboration among multiple institutions. And it openly challenged the for-profit vendors, like Oracle’s PeopleSoft, that dominate the multibillion-dollar market for administrative systems. Known as enterprise resource planning, or ERP, systems, they help college officials carry out crucial business functions. Commercial versions can cost tens of millions of dollars to license and maintain.

The entire Silicon Valley tech scene is filled with ludicrous buzz phrases that are often decried by the media. Terms like “engagement,” “disrupt,” and “innovation” are commonly thrown around by those who want to be part of the Valley subculture.

Science

A private company located in eastern China has printed ten full-size houses using a huge 3D printer in the space of a day. The process utilizes quick-drying cement, but the creators are being careful not to reveal the secrets of the technology.

China’s WinSun company, used a system of four 10 meter wide by 6.6 meter high printers with multi-directional sprays to create the houses. Cement and construction waste was used to build the walls layer-by-layer, state news agency Xinhua reported.

Security

The zero-day code-execution hole in IE versions 6 through 11 represents a significant threat to the Internet security because there is currently no fix for the underlying bug, which affects an estimated 26 percent of the total browser market. It’s also the first significant vulnerability to target Windows XP users since Microsoft withdrew support for that aging OS earlier this month. Users who have the option of using an alternate browser should avoid all use of IE for the time being. Those who remain dependent on the Microsoft browser should immediately install EMET, Microsoft’s freely available toolkit that greatly extends the security of Windows systems.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

The U.S. and Philippine governments have agreed on a 10-year pact to open this southeast Asian country to more U.S. troops, warships, and fighter planes, flouting the people’s movements that booted the U.S. military from its permanent Philippine bases over twenty years ago.

“We have lost too much because of the U.S. military presence in our country,” Bernadette Ellorin, Chairperson of BAYAN-USA—an alliance of Filipino organizations in the U.S, told Common Dreams. “The Philippines has long history of protests against militarization. The protests now are only going to grow.”

The Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement was announced Sunday by the White House and confirmed by two anonymous Philippine officials speaking to the Associated Press.

Pro-Moscow separatists in eastern Ukraine were holding a group of European military observers in the city of Slavyansk on Friday night, claiming they had been travelling with a spy for the Kiev government.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

Nearly 60% of China’s underground water is polluted, state media has reported, underscoring the severity of the country’s environmental woes.

The country’s land and resources ministry found that among 4,778 testing spots in 203 cities, 44% had “relatively poor” underground water quality; the groundwater in another 15.7% tested as “very poor”.

Water quality improved year-on-year at 647 spots, and worsened in 754 spots, the ministry said.

Nearly 28 years after the worst nuclear accident in history, several bird species are doing the seemingly impossible: flourishing inside the radioactive Chernobyl Exclusion Zone in Ukraine. Due to lingering radiation from the 1986 meltdown of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, humans aren’t allowed to live there—but the region has become an accidental ecological testing ground for scientists interested in studying the effects of radiation on wild animals. Ionizing radiation damages living cells by producing free radicals, leading to genetic damage and, eventually, death. An animal’s only hope is to neutralize those free radicals by upping its production of antioxidants. And that’s exactly what most birds in Chernobyl seem to be doing—with even better results than scientists expected. A team of ecologists used nets to capture 152 birds from 16 species inside and around the 2600-square-kilometer exclusion zone. After assessing the birds’ antioxidant levels, amount of DNA damage, and body condition, the researchers were surprised to find that most of the birds, like the hawfinch pictured above, seemed to benefit from the chronic exposure to radiation. Birds found in areas with higher radiation levels had more antioxidants and better overall body condition, the team reports online this week in Functional Ecology. This is the first known example of wild animals adapting to chronic radiation exposure, the researchers say. The only two bird species negatively affected by the radiation—the great tit (Parus major) and barn swallow (Hirundo rustica)—both produce large amounts of pinkish pheomelanin pigment in their feathers. Because pheomelanin production requires lots of antioxidants, the researchers suspect these birds may not have enough left over to fight off the free radicals. In Chernobyl, it seems that fancy feathers come at a high price.

Finance

One of the big mysteries in politics is why so many right-wing people support Iain Duncan Smith’s Stalinist Workfare schemes, which are designed to force people (under threat of absolute destitution) to give away their labour for free, often to highly profitable foreign corporations.

For years, the US enjoyed unrivalled prosperity – and its middle classes were the envy of the world. No longer. Last week, a study of decades of economic data concluded that the US had fallen behind other nations, apart, that is, from the super-rich

Privacy

The term “Dark Net” is shorthand to describe the hidden and encrypted part of the internet beyond the reach of normal browsers, accessible only using the anonymous browser Tor. It’s protected by a clever traffic encryption system which makes it very difficult to locate the servers which host sites – called Tor Hidden Services – and the IP addresses of the people the visit them. Tor used to stand for The Onion Router, and so some call this world “Onionland”. Anonymity and freedom rule Onionland, not censorship.

If you are currently using the Reddit Unity Scope on Ubuntu, you should consider disabling it. The reason for this is that a Reddit admin pointed out that Ubuntu user dash searches were ending up in Reddit’s server logs.

This is happening because the Reddit Unity Scope uses a URL that does not have SSL configured so instead redirects those queries to HTTP plain text. The good news is a fix is already under way on a bug I filed and Reddit’s API documentation explains how to properly use SSL when making queries.

A new, eerie web project called Digital Shadow combs through your Facebook profile and pulls together enough of your information to create a dossier creepy enough to make you want to quit social networking altogether.

Once you login and grant the site access to your Facebook profile, the system simulates a hacker attack and creates a list of “pawns” (friends who can betray you), “obsessions” (people you creep on the most) and “scapegoats” (people you would be willing to sacrifice), as well as photos of your favorite places and an analysis of your posting habits.

Civil Rights

On April 20, 1914, the Colorado National Guard and a private militia employed by the Colorado Fuel & Iron Company (CF&I) opened fire on a tent camp of striking coal miners at Ludlow, Colo. At least 19 people died in the camp that day, mostly women and children.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

As Gottfrid Svartholm languishes in a Danish prison cell, unusual things are happening on the other side of the world. Speaking with TorrentFreak, a former work colleague of the Pirate Bay founder says that after receiving threats from an anonymous Swedish policeman, Danish police and the Copenhagen Deputy District Attorney turned up in Cambodia to ask him “ridiculous” questions.

In one month, on May 25 at 20:00, the voting stations close for the European Elections. You’re never entitled to complain when media doesn’t cover you, but for some reason, the fifth-largest party out of Sweden’s eight – the Pirate Party – is consistently omitted from listings, events, debates, and coverage ahead of European Elections. For a challenger, this would be acceptable, but not for a defender of title: the pretend-does-not-exist attitude is reaching ridiculous levels.